The morning air is fog-softened. I smell rain coming, feel the cool pause before the first drops falls. From the kitchen window I see a tiny creature moving up from the creek bed. I discover it’s a coyote pup, a few days old. Her hind leg is misshapen. Every few steps she tips over and falls on her back. She scrambles up and then falls again. I watched her face. Her eyes never shift; they are with me while I spread my thick bathrobe on the ground.
“C’mon baby.” I call. She opens her mouth and shows me her needle sharp teeth and blinks at me, and then she scrambles into the folds of my robe, her body shivers and then goes limp. I can feel the heat of her breathing, feel her trembling and then she eases herself deeper and I feel the warmth close around her. I wrap her with my robe, and she lets the motion carry her.
My heart breaks. I smell her death. She won’t survive in nature. That’s what her coyote mother is counting on. I know this is why she put her out of the den. By taking up this coyote baby I have made changes, complicated the laws of nature. I want to dismiss all of this. My desire is strong to make things right. But there are balances and harmonies with wild creatures always shifting, always necessary to maintain.
I take her to our county animal shelter, I used to work there, I know the vet. We both know what must be done. We try to shake off the feeling by talking. She will receive the injection and her spirit will slip back from where it came. Snowy earth comes gliding.
We Who Walk the Seven Ways is Terra Trevor’s memoir about seeking healing and finding belonging. After she endured a difficult loss, a circle of Native women elders embraced and guided Trevor (mixed-blood Cherokee, Lenape, Seneca, and German) through the seven cycles of life in Indigenous ways. Over three decades, these women lifted her from grief, instructed her in living, and showed her how to age from youth into beauty.
With tender honesty, Trevor explores how every ending is always a beginning. Her reflections on the deep power of women’s friendship, losing a child, reconciling complicated roots, and finding richness in every stage of life show that being an American Indian with a complex lineage is not about being part something, but about being part of something.
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“Terra Trevor’s memoir is a gentle invitation to journey with her across decades, an invitation to notice with her as she seeks healing and finds belonging. There were phrases and sentences I underlined, places where I wept, passages that will remain with me as they drew me to insights I’d previously struggled to name. I closed the final pages and knew that in reading this book, I had been the recipient of a generous and much-needed gift. While I can certainly finish a book in a day, I chose to move slowly through this one, letting each idea, each paragraph, each reflection gently spill over me, allowing the pages to alter me in some way.” —Patrice Gopo, author of Autumn Song: Essays on Absence
